A Genealogy of Queer Detachment

Despite their widespread attention to the confluence of queer sexualities and "decadence" in fin-de-siecle writing, queer theorists have yet to overcome the two concepts' persistently destructive conflation. This essay explores the latent positive affinities of queerness and decadence in Walter Pater's Renaissance, which links them through what I call queer detachment. A balance of engagement with and withdrawal from history, this critical perspective anticipates queer theory's methodologies as well as other queer modernist productions. Examining Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood's chronicle of decadent Weimar Germany, I demonstrate how queer detachment becomes an increasingly politicized method of literary and social world making, a means of reengaging the politics and aesthetics of queer history. These works, and others like them, encourage scholars to realize decadence's positivity, to conceptualize a queer theory that refuses to acquiesce to residual historical narratives and philosophical systems without, for all that, refusing their value entirely.